Pauline Oliveros

Pauline Oliveros (1932-2016) shared many interests of the 1960s ‘New York School’. She celebrated the sounds considered marginal by others, coining the term ‘Deep Listening’ to describe what it meant to listen ‘in every possible way to every thing possible to hear no matter what you are doing…Deep Listening represents a heightened state of awareness and connects to all that there is’. Oliveros was a pioneer of electronics, meditative music, improvisation, alternate tuning systems, contemporary accordion playing, and multimedia events. Her work with myth, ritual, and the environment had a profound influence. Oliveros was a founding member of the San Francisco Tape Music Center in the 1960s and served as its first director when it moved to Mills College, where she was the Darius Milhaud Artist-in-Residence. In 1967 she joined the faculty at the University of California, San Diego, where she taught until 1981. She was later appointed Distinguished Research Professor of Music at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, NY. Among Oliveros’s many achievements were winning the Gaudeamus Composition prize (1962), representing the U.S. at the World Fair in Osaka (Japan), being honoured with a retrospective at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington D.C., receiving a letter of distinction from the American Music Center, winning the the John Cage Award (2012) of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the GigaHertz Preis from ZKM Karlsruhe for lifetime achievement in Electronic Music, the Resounding Vision Award for Life Time Achievement from Nameless Sound in Houston, and honorary membership in the Society for American Music. ‘Take a walk at night. Walk so silently that the bottoms of your feet become ears’.